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Dreams of a McCain Presidency

October 11, 2011 2:05 pmOctober 11, 2011 2:05 pm

The most interesting part of Ezra Klein’s lengthy “what went wrong” assessment of the Obama administration’s economic policy is the way it raises the possibility that a John McCain presidency might have delivered a more effective response to the Great Recession. With McCain in the White House and a Democratic majority in Congress, Klein implies, we might have had a smaller, better-targeted stimulus package (perhaps more like the one that Alice Rivlin recommended) joined to a more robust intervention in the housing market (like the one McCain’s campaign proposed in the autumn of 2008). Jonathan Chait takes this idea and uses it to make a broader argument that a McCain presidency would have forestalled the popular backlash against deficit-financed stimulus:

… [Because] you had an all-Democratic government, led by a charismatic, young, black president … any measures to alleviate the crisis struck millions of conservatives as a terrifying redistribution of wealth, a frightful and permanent unmooring of the nation from its tradition of liberty. This helped encourage the hyper-partisan response of Republican leaders, who abandoned the belief in Keynesian stimulus that they had previously endorsed in 2001 and 2008. (Yes, Republicans passed a stimulus bill in 2008. Their turnabout against stimulus was rapid and total.)

Perhaps a President McCain might have designed a less sweeping and less effective stimulus than President Obama did. But Republicans would have gone along — after all, they did under Bush, and this time the justification was far stronger. It’s also likely that Democrats would have gone along, because they have shown themselves to be happy to support stimulus under Republican presidents. It also seems likely that, as the crisis deepened, President McCain would have fought for more stimulus measures, and these measures would not have been dead on arrival because there would not have been a right-wing backlash against the first one.

From a different ideological vantage point, I’ve entertained versions of this argument myself, and imagined a world in which McCain’s dealmaking instincts and the incentives of divided government delivered effective right-leaning public policy on issues ranging from health care to tax reform. But I think that both Chait’s scenario and mine depend on an overestimation of the Democratic Party’s public-spiritedness. Just imagine for a moment the scenario in which McCain would have taken office: As the Republican inheritor of an economic crisis that began under a hated Republican incumbent; as the man who eked out a narrow, narrow victory in an election that Democrats considered their greatest electoral opportunity in a generation; and as the beneficiary — or so liberals would have told themselves — of the American public’s latent racism, which would have been constantly invoked as the only possible explanation for McCain’s victory and Barack Obama’s defeat. (And that’s without even touching the Sarah Palin factor …)

Maybe, maybe, Congressional Democrats would have gone along with McCain on some emergency economic legislation. But it’s easy to imagine the arguments that liberals would have discovered against, say, a sweeping payroll tax holiday (it’s undercutting Social Security!) to say nothing of how they would have reacted if McCain had attempted to push a health care reform that undermined employer based coverage, or something similarly disruptive on taxes.

Overall, in a McCain presidency Democrats would have faced the same political incentives Republicans face now — where it’s easier to blame a terrible economy on the president than to find ways to cooperate with him — with two added reasons to fight rather than to deal: First, they could have easily pinned the whole of the economic crisis on the G.O.P. (“the Bush-McCain Depression,” etc.), and second, they would have had a potentially unbeatable Hillary Clinton rather than a suspect Mitt Romney waiting in the wings for 2012.

To win significant cooperation under those circumstances, I suspect that McCain would have had to essentially surrender to Democratic priorities, which in turn would have turned him into a kind of John Tyler figure — a president despised by his own party and a first-term lame duck. And whether you start from liberal or conservative premises, it’s hard to see that scenario playing out happily for the United States or the world.

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About

Ross Douthat joined The New York Times as an Op-Ed columnist in April 2009. Previously, he was a senior editor at the Atlantic and a blogger for theatlantic.com. He is the author of "Privilege: Harvard and the Education of the Ruling Class" (Hyperion, 2005) and the co-author, with Reihan Salam, of "Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream" (Doubleday, 2008). He is the film critic for National Review.